Which internet recording platform for your daily birds? (1 Viewer)

[bonxie birder]

As a UK birder, I hold my hands up and admit I’m an avid eBird user. I find the amount of information available is immense and incredibly useful, particularly for travelling abroad (and it’s free). However I am aware of two downsides. Firstly it follows Clements, so I have to remember to add Green-winged Teal to all my lists, but secondly and much more significantly, British birders don’t use it. I record all my bird sightings on eBird (and also use BirdGuides for my rarer records), but I’m clearly in the minority. So my question is where do British birders submit their records of lesser redpoll, water rail and merlin?

 

[Andy Adcock]

As a UK birder, I hold my hands up and admit I’m an avid eBird user. I find the amount of information available is immense and incredibly useful, particularly for travelling abroad (and it’s free). However I am aware of two downsides. Firstly it follows Clements, so I have to remember to add Green-winged Teal to all my lists, but secondly and much more significantly, British birders don’t use it. I record all my bird sightings on eBird (and also use BirdGuides for my rarer records), but I’m clearly in the minority. So my question is where do British birders submit their records of lesser redpoll, water rail and merlin?

Most people (my generation anyway) will submit anything of interest to their County recorder, records will then, only be available in summary in an end of year report unless a national rarity is more widely broadcast.

Only in the last four or five years, have I seen people uploading to ebird, some, obsessively so!

 

[Mike Crawley]

I'm with Andy in that all my stuff goes into the relevant County Recorder, whether that’s at home or on a day out or on my Scilly holiday.
Same with any rarity I’m lucky to find/catch-up with.
This approach saves the Recorder or their helpers searchping eBird, Birdguides, RBA, etc. (although I believe Birdguides and RBA provide data to the Recorders, but someone still has to check through that information).
As we old duffers gradually shuffle off, I’m sure recording and submission of records will change.

 

[a_j_steele]

Birdtrack and ebird myself. Intresting our county (herts) as started using ebird since last years bird report to gather data as well as birds for alot of commoner species, also of note london birds club are apparently in the early stages of uploading there data on to ebird.

 

[Nutcracker]

A flat wooden platform in my garden, they really like it 😁

 

[Farnboro John]

Notebook. I have them going back to the Eighties. It's a hobby, so the last thing I want to be doing is paperwork, even virtually.

John

 

[Andy Adcock]

Notebook. I have them going back to the Eighties. It's a hobby, so the last thing I want to be doing is paperwork, even virtually.

John

So what's a notebook if it's not 'paperwork' John?

 

[Nutcracker]

So what's a notebook if it's not 'paperwork' John?

A subspecies of Falco subbuteo, if I've read the post right 🤪

 

[Farnboro John]

So what's a notebook if it's not 'paperwork' John?

Er.....🤭 It's paperwork. But you only fill it out once, a tiny bit at a time as part of actually doing your hobby (no comedians please). No transcription afterwards.

 

[bonxie birder]

I'm with Andy in that all my stuff goes into the relevant County Recorder, whether that’s at home or on a day out or on my Scilly holiday.
Same with any rarity I’m lucky to find/catch-up with.
This approach saves the Recorder or their helpers searchping eBird, Birdguides, RBA, etc. (although I believe Birdguides and RBA provide data to the Recorders, but someone still has to check through that information).
As we old duffers gradually shuffle off, I’m sure recording and submission of records will change.

Using eBird I can filter my records from a particular county and send them to the county recorder in one neat file.

 

[raymie]

I think eBird is hard to beat, for both keeping track of what you've seen and as a tool to figure out where to go to look for particular birds.

 

[Xenospiza]

I use the platform that will disseminate my sightings locally or that is most suitable to my needs.
So https://www.ornitho.de/ for German birds, http://observation.org/ for anything non-bird-related (mostly plants and butterflies for me, but obscure stuff is possible as well) locally or internationally.
For international birding, ebird would be more suitable as I find it far easier to navigate than observation.org (and it is used a lot more).
If I had still lived in the UK, I would have definitely used ebird by now.
I find iNaturalist hard to comprehend thusfar, but that may just be me not trying hard enough...

 

[raymie]

I use iNaturalist a lot as well, mostly for non-birds but for birds as well to a lesser extent.

 

[Phil Bishop]

I've been using ebird for around 5 years now, ever since I stared to use Scythebill to record my sightings and realised it had an export to ebird facility. I've largely stopped using a notebook as well (at least for birds) and use the ebird phone app.
I have used iNaturalist as well, mainly for non birds but for some reason I don't really get on with it.

 

[Owen Krout]

I tried iNaturalist for awhile, but I also found it to be more work than it was worth. eBird is what I settled on mainly as it automatically does the record keeping for me. I still take field notes manually just to jog my memory once I am back home and sorting through id photos. I am one of the grumpy old men who dislikes fiddling with a phone or tablet as I find it distracts my attention from the nature I am there to commune with.